A Genesis and Genealogy of British Curriculum Studies

Bernstein’s View of Curriculum Studies

In many ways the early forms of curriculum studies inherited the technical-rational view of curriculum that was predominant in the U.S. curriculum field at this time. A belief in a science of education, a technological view of school knowledge and an overwhelming concern with prescription and guidelines characterised this version of curriculum studies. At this stage then curriculum studies was wholly deserving of Bernstein’s characterisation that "curriculum studies is in part, but not wholly technical in focus and probably in operation". By the early 1970s Bernstein sees curriculum studies as the thin end of the wedge which will bring down the pre-eminent foundational discourse. He sees "with the rise of curriculum studies as a region, inserted between ‘education’ and professional studies, the beginning of the technologizing of teacher training".

Bernstein then anticipates the profound technologizing of teacher training which began in earnest under the Tories after Thatcher’s election in 1979. But the crucial point to emphasize is that curriculum studies was always, to use British parlance, a ‘sitting duck’ (i.e. a target waiting to be shot down). This vulnerability grew from the close relationship of curriculum studies to the state and to governance; and associated with this, to the overwhelmingly technicist approach to curriculum that was adopted.

In some ways the uncritical and a theoretical posture of curriculum studies reflected the affluence and optimism of the period of genesis in the 1960s. This was an epoch of large curriculum projects which produced a wide range of ideas and materials. One might develop an analogy with Clancy Segal’s judgement about California at this time, ‘Each moment of the present promised so much of the future that the past seemed irrelevant.’

In such a period, structures might seem to be suspended and theory, politics and history likewise. But this illusion was only to confirm the complicitous and technicist nature of curriculum studies. In a profound sense, curriculum studies grew up without any developed sense of politics of conceptualisations of power, of ideological critique, of theory. Where theory did develop it was primarily internalistic focusing on how to ‘implement’ or ‘manage’ the curriculum.

Whilst political developments were favourable and expansionary, this problem was held in suspension; once the tide of politics and economy changed after the oil crisis of 1973, curriculum studies was exposed as primarily a discourse without the modes of theorising or analysis which could interrogate new patterns of political governance and guidance.

Into this desert marched Bernstein and his troops at the Institute of Education. Armed with his critique of curriculum studies and with a socio-political approach to the study of curriculum, his work began to address the theoretical vacuum at the heart of British curriculum studies.

Paradoxically, so successful and influential was the work, particularly as collected in Knowledge and Control that in some ways he was able to change curriculum studies and hence partially out-run his own critique.

New Directions in Curriculum Studies

Curriculum studies by 1970 had developed a number of important ‘counter-cultures’ which sought to address the problems of technicism. It is important therefore to take the axioms of our own sociology of knowledge seriously and not to assume curriculum studies was monolithic. The dominant tendency might be clear but other traditions were of growing importance and of long-term significance. Bernstein’s stands as a major initiator of these dissident traditions.

Curriculum studies then are best viewed in analogy with Bucher and Strauss’ view of professions as "loose amalgamations of segments pursuing different objectives in different manners and more or less delicately held together at particular periods in history".

So it was with curriculum studies in the early 1970s. Whilst the technical-rational "tradition" was certainly strong and probably still pre-eminent two other traditions sought to escape from the limitations involved. Firstly a new school of neo-Schwabian curriculum scholars grew up, in England, epitomised by the work of Lawrence Stenhouse at The Centre for Applied Research in East Anglia. This "applied research" tradition in curriculum studies sought to transcend the banalities of technical-rational curriculum theory by direct involvement in curriculum projects and classroom action-research. A second tradition was the new "Sociology of Curriculum" tradition paradoxically stimulated by Bernstein’s own work. This work sought to conceptualise power in the study of curriculum and to develop a new range of sociologically-informed curriculum study.